Visuomotor Robotic Pruning in Planar Orchards Using Hybrid Reinforcement Learning

Dormant tree pruning is labor-intensive yet essential for maintaining modern high-productivity fruit orchards. In this work, we focus on pruning of modern planar tree training systems—V-Trellis apples and UFO cherries—where trunks and primary branches are trained into approximately planar walls. We introduce an end-to-end pipeline to learn a closed-loop visuomotor controller for robotic pruning. This controller is trained entirely using simulation and synthetically generated data and deployed in real orchards in a zero-shot manner. The pipeline comprises synthetic generation of planar orchard tree meshes, construction of a physics-based orchard simulator, automated collection of successful pruning trajectories via motion planning, and policy learning with a novel hybrid reinforcement-learning algorithm (Hybrid-PPO) that combines offline demonstrations with online simulated rollouts. The controller uses optical-flow inputs from a wrist-mounted camera—avoiding the need for full 3D-reconstruction—and continuously guides the cutter through cluttered branch environments to a specified cutpoint with correct tool orientation. In exhaustive simulated task-space evaluations over 3,000 pruning points, the policy attains 49.9% success on V-Trellis apples and 46.0% on UFO cherries. We validate the learned controller across 38 physical trials—comprising 28 outdoor field trials in commercial and experimental orchards and 10 indoor laboratory tests—demonstrating zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. The learned policy also outperforms a classical RRT-Connect baseline on physical hardware in laboratory trials.

IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics, Special Issue on Precision Agriculture and Forestry